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Last month Christina had a chance to read the new edition of Dr. Jones’s book, and then to meet virtually with him for a conversation about his life and work, and the essential place that singing, studying, and teaching about spirituals has had in both.
As he writes in the preface to the revised edition of Wade in the Water, “Over the years I have become increasingly comfortable using the word ‘calling’ as I talk about this passionate desire to immerse myself in the songs of the ancestors and the cultural, psychological, and spiritual teachings that are embedded in their melodies, rhythms, and lyrics.”
He first heard the calling as a New York City teenager, when he was chosen for the All-City High School Chorus. “It was directed by a famous conductor, Peter Wilhousky, and it was really high level. As a student, singing in the choir was the one thing I lived for! We had rehearsals on Saturday mornings, and it was a long way from my house to get to rehearsals in Manhattan, but I would count the hours and days each week between rehearsals. I had sung spirituals as a child in church choirs, but in the All-City Chorus the arrangements we sang were just so incredible. I loved all the music we did, but I really loved the spirituals.” When it came time to go to college he briefly considered the possibility of studying music, but “I had to sort of agree with my parents that it wasn’t a very practical thing to do. I was only the second person in my family to go to college, and security was an important thing.” He went on to get a degree in psychology, and went happily into private practice and academic work. In 1978 he moved to Denver to teach, and after a period of mild depression that he couldn’t explain – “all of the objective experiences in my life were really good” - he decided to enter Jungian analysis. After about a year, “I started having all these dreams about music – there were orchestras playing, and jazz bands, there were classically oriented singers, and R&B singers – and I thought, ‘What is this?’ The dreams became louder and louder – they almost became like nightmares. And for a while I didn’t tell my analyst about it at all, but then it got to the point where, when he would ask what dreams I had had, those were my only dreams, and finally I had to tell him! So he said, ‘Well, tell me about music – what’s up with music?’ I told him about singing in All-City Chorus, and about performing a solo when I was a senior, during a concert at Lincoln Center, which was televised – I told him about the excitement of all of that. And he hesitated for a long time, and then he said, ‘I don’t know how to say this, and I don’t want to insult you, but we’ve been working together for a year, and this is the first time you’ve shown up here. And I don’t know what you should do with these dreams but I do know that if you don’t honor them, they won’t stop. Ever.’ So that was my cue that I had to start singing again.” Jones hired a voice teacher, auditioned for an opera, and got small roles. Eventually he volunteered to put together a concert that would include a program on the history and meaning of spirituals. He then pushed himself to do the research, but found it so stressful that he vowed throughout the preparation that he would never do anything like that again. “But then when I did it, there was just something that happened. I felt like, wow, I really needed to do that. And I realized that I’d never seen or heard a whole program that was just based on spirituals, and I was just overcome with a lot of emotion. And eventually I realized that in all the expertise I had developed in African American psychology, there had been a real missing piece. I’d always taught students about oral culture and its roots in Africa, but it was kind of just lip service, really. What I felt when I did this program was, these spirituals that African Americans created, these were the beginning of oral culture in this country, and they established the foundation for everything else. And I became obsessed with learning more.”
His own learning led to teaching others. When professional colleagues asked about his research on psychological issues within the African American community, he would bring up the ever-converging work he was doing on spirituals, including not just their history, but also the centrality of singing them as experiential healing. These conversations led to him being invited to present at conferences around the world. In 1998 he founded the Spirituals Project, to preserve and revitalize the music and teachings of spirituals, through research, educational programming, and musical performance, anchored by its multicultural, intergenerational Spirituals Project Choir; it became an official program of the University of Denver Lamont School of Music in 2016.
In 1993 Dr. Jones published the first edition of Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals; the new edition will be available for sale and signing at the workshop of October 14. In the book, he synthesizes his research and singing of spirituals, his understanding as a scientifically oriented psychologist, and his studies of contemplative spirituality. Combining all of this knowledge, he looks at the experience of enslaved African American people, and describes the way that singing could provide physical, spiritual, and psychological protection and healing, and how gathering in secret and singing together could help to rewire the energy that had been depleted throughout long days of extremely arduous physical labor, violence, and psychological oppression.
For the Saturday October 14 workshop he’ll talk about the different African cultures and sensibilities that provided the foundation for the spirituals’ creation, and explain and demonstrate how and why those cultures made music so central to everything they did. He’ll talk about the way that spirituals gain a key part of their power from the tensions of opposites – both sadness and hope – that they hold. And he’ll look at their resilience, across time and cultures. “They remain alive no matter what people do to them, whether gospelized, classical-ized, or sung in folk style,” he says. He’ll also help people to understand the difference between gospels and spirituals, which he says is a common misunderstanding. “Let’s get that difference out of the way, and then we can talk about spirituals.”
Please join us on October 14 for the workshop and book signing with Dr. Jones! Details and registration are here. Our thanks to the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities for their support of this event.
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